An irregularly updated blog whose purpose is to chronicle the development of my various wargaming projects, but primarily my foray into the joys of colonial wargaming set in the Sudan

Sunday, 19 June 2016

Poseidon's Warriors

Poseidon’s Warriors is the latest release from Osprey
Wargames and, as far as I am aware, only their second on a fully naval theme. PW is a
set of fast playing rules covering the classical naval era from 480BC (Salamis)
to 31BC (Actium).

The core rules are short and sweet – 9 pages of the 64 pages
of the book, and even then those nine pages are profusely illustrated, covering
the main mechanics of manoeuvre, ramming, boarding and morale. They are
extremely bloody; in a game featuring Quadremes or smaller ships (which make up
the bulk of many navies) a single attack is virtually guaranteed to cripple and
sink an enemy ship, and even larger ships succumb to successful attacks with
relative ease. So it is that manoeuvre and knowing when and how to strike, as
well as accepting the risk of losses in the approach. Ships are divided into
squadrons of 5 ships (or single large ships) and players alternate activating
squadrons, completing all movement, ramming, firing and boarding for a squadron
before passing to the other player to do the same.

Additional sections add crew quality command and control, leaders
and personalities, special weapons and the effects of terrain in the form of
land, shoals and shallows, followed by a number of generic scenarios and a
campaign system. Fleet lists from the Greek and Persian wars through to the
Roman civil wars completes the package.

As with all the osprey Wargames series the book is nicely
laid out and profusely illustrated with paintings from previous Osprey books
and also with photos from Rod Langton’s excellent 1/300 and 1/1200 ranges.

This is a great package of rules and supporting material
that makes for a quick and exciting standalone game, or a club campaign over a
few evenings or weeks. Recommended.

The blurb says 5-7 squadrons each of 1-5 ships per player. And at the level the rules are pitched that seems entirely reasonable. There is no indication of scaling models to represent ships so nominally 1:1 That said, since the Actium scenario uses about 50-60 models for each side there is some implicit scaling at around 1 model per 5 ships even if its not declared :)